Citadel of the Blogs The Inbox of the Internet (really)

speaking of RSS…

Streams of news metaphor for aggregators

if you ever tried to explain the usefulness of RSS feeds to someone, this might help. — IF you love melodrama.

update on april 13: after reflecting on this, I think the metaphor is messy. The Google Reader Introduction Video offers a much more sustainable analogy: aggregators are like “inboxes for the web”. You have an email inbox where you collect info from others (as opposed to contact them individually); and you have an RSS aggregator where you also collect info from others (as opposed to visiting each page individually).

Better, what?

i don’t know what to say about this. but it was novel enough to post about.

for some time now, I have been using an RSS aggregator at home (NetNewsWire). It is free and lets you open up new windows behind it so it is convenient that way.

But when I want to share with others some of the great blogs out there, I have to post to them individually. For instance, there are some very useful blogs about Japan for those interested in it. But how to keep track of them or, indeed, allow others to recommend their own?

So at first I looked into Bloglines. Despite the fact that it resorts to old-school frames, it does what it sets out to do. So, for example, my Bloglines is here and you can see just about every blog I will regularly or occasionally read.

So what? To be honest, I still prefer NetNewsWire to this. Except lately I want to access my blogs from other comptuers and as with everything pre-web 2.0 NetNewsWire is not accessible from multiple locations. So I started looking at bloglines again. I dislike the format and frankly, I think it is ugly. But what are the alternatives?

Enter Google Reader. I saw a video tutorial of this and thought it looked promising. And if it is anything like Google’s other stuff, imagined it might offer some cool features Bloglines does not.

Well, yes and no. For starters, it won’t let me share all my blogs with you as bloglines does. But it does let me share individual posts with you: Google Reader - Chris’ shared items.

While this is a limitation, I recommend Google reader for ease of reading. I may not be able to share all the blogs, but I can track them a little more easily.

Also, the way bloglines and Google reader organize your blogs is entirely different: with bloglines, you create a folder and drag and drop the blog into it; with Google reader, you do as Gmail does: create labels and then tag the blog with it (allows multiple tagging).

Also like Gmail, google reader gives you one sentence previews in list form. I still think both bloglines and google reader need to let you preview blog entries better. For my taste, netnewswire still does this better.

update: april 13 to reflect google reader keyboard hints

1. ga - Go to all items view.
2. gs - Go to Starred Items.
3. gu - Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a particular feed.
4. gt - Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a tag
5. s - Star an item
6. n - Navigate to next item without opening it
7. p - Navigate to previous item without opening it
8. j - Open next item
9. k - Open previous item
10. o - Open / Close item
11. r - Refresh. (I think I’ve worn out this key)
12. t - Pop up dialog box letting you assign a tag to an item. Very cool.
13. Shift+A - Mark all as read.

via Johnny’s Thoughts

Opinion-piece claiming that

“As more land is used to grow corn rather than other food crops, such as soy, their prices also rise. And since corn is used as animal feed, the price of meat goes up, too. The food supply is being diverted to feed the United States’ hungry cars.”

But… “Ethanol made from sugar cane, by contrast, is good. It produces far more energy than is needed to grow it, and Brazil, the main producer, has plenty of land available on which to grow sugar without necessarily reducing food production or encroaching on rain forests.”

Interesting read.

interesting look at what folks do on the Internet.

for myself, I probably follow the general patterns:
email (gmail)
facebook
news (BBC)
surfing (RSS: netnewswire, bloglines, google reader)
searching (google and google images)
instant message (yahoo messenger, google talk, ichat)
file sharing (kdx, bittorrent, gnutella)
discussion groups (yahoo groups; google groups)

that’s probably about it.